


Moments like these

by intern_at_german_chapterhouse



Series: The Mechanic, the Hero and the Kind Soul. [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Dark, F/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Sad, Sad with a Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-23 09:00:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20005705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intern_at_german_chapterhouse/pseuds/intern_at_german_chapterhouse
Summary: There were moments in which Pepper was almost glad that Tony wasn't there to witness what was happening t the people around him.This got a little darker than anticipated, please check the notes at the end if there are some topics you are sensitive to.





	Moments like these

Even though Pepper Potts missed her husband with every fibre of her being, there were moments she was almost glad that he wasn't there to see.  
Some of them were small. The moments where you jokingly say “Ha, I'm glad he isn't here to see this!” Like when Peter made fun of Happy for the way he handled his phone when he tried to take a picture of all five of them.

Others where a little bigger. Those where the moments she could feel her own heart breaking and knew that his would have been shattered.

The first time Pepper truly though that it was better that Tony wasn't there was when she visited the Parkers' in their new apartment in New York. It was even smaller than the one she had gone to after the boy hadn't come back from space. But that wasn't the bad part. May and Peter, they made it work. The thing that hurt her was when she walked into Peter's room. It was fall and a little after dinner. Peter and Morgan went to his room to look at something he had made in school and Pepper and May drank some wine and talked. When they were just the tiniest bit tipsy, Pepper decided to get Morgan and go home. So she went into Peter's room and found them sitting on the bed. There wasn't room for much else besides the bed, only a desk and closet. The Spider-Man suit hanging from the closet door made Pepper smile and she told Morgan to say goodbye to Peter. The two kids hugged and Peter told her, he'd come downstairs to the car with them. He said he wanted to give something to Happy anyway and ran after Morgan who was already on her way to the front door. Still with a smile on her lips, Pepper began to close the door when she realized that the lights were still turned on. She reached for the light switch – and stopped. There were black strips of tape crisscrossed all over the switch and an orange post it stuck to the wall above it. “Do not turn off” it said. It took Pepper a second to fully understand what this meant. Peter couldn't sleep with the lights turned off. He was scared. Of the dark or maybe just the things he saw there. This boy who always seemed so happy, so much stronger than anyone around him. Who always made sure to only get something cheap when they went out for dinner because he knew his aunt didn't have too much money. The bay who kept lecturing them on not using to much power and reduce waste (although May had just told Pepper that this particular radicalization was due to a certain girl Peter seemed to be fond of). That kid kept the lights on all night because he couldn't sleep otherwise. And then she remembered walking past the room Peter and Harley shared at her place. How she had always thought they were up all night talking or scheming because no matter when she walked past their door, there was light coming out from under it. It was because Peter couldn't sleep without it. When Pepper finally arrived downstairs Peter was sitting in the back seat of the car, laughing. And just the thought of this happy kid going back upstairs and being afraid to sleep made Pepper's heart ache all over. And in that second she was glad that Tony didn't have to see what the war had done to the teenager.

Then there was Steve Rogers. Pepper knew that even though their relationship hadn't been the best the past seven years, Steve had been important to Tony. So seeing him leave and come back seventy years older, knowing that he wouldn't live much longer, that would have hurt Tony. She understood why Rogers did it, she knew that his life had been happier than the one he had had in this time line. She knew that he had done whatever he could to help the people he loved over there, he told her about rescuing Bucky and his younger self ( who apparently kept the mantle of Captain America with Bucky his side) and getting Nat out of the red room. But seeing him die, as peaceful as it might have been, was hard on her. It was hard on everyone. They had just gone through losing Nat and Tony and being unable to bring Vision back. So losing yet another Avenger, one of the first ones nonetheless, hurt in a special kind of way. And Pepper knew that Tony blamed himself for all their losses, no matter how irrational that might be. So he probably would have found some astonishing way to blame himself for this too.

Then there was the whole thing with Mysterio, or Quentin Beck. Pepper didn't only hear of it and saw the reports on the news, she also called Happy and let him tell her everything he and Peter went through. She was in her office when suddenly all the news played the same thing: a message by Mysterio. Telling the world that Peter Parker was Spider-Man and that he killed him. In a few seconds, Mysterio had completely destroyed everything Peter has kept private and hidden, for the sake of his loved ones' safety. And he managed to drag down Tony Stark's name as well. The world believed him, of course they did. This world had been through so much no one really knew what was right or wrong, fake or real anymore. And so people blamed Peter for murders carried out through Stark technology because he wanted to be the next Iron Man. Mysterio destroyed the reputation of Peter, Tony and Stark Industries in one fell swoop. The empire Tony had built on the ruins of the one his father had started: the company that reflected his own transition from Merchant Of Death to Earth's Best Defender. Mysterio corrupted Tony's legacy and Pepper was glad that Tony wasn't there to witness it.

Peter wasn't the only teenager Tony had taken under his wing. There was also Harley. Pepper had made sure to take care of him as best as she could as someone outside of family. But a few years after everything happened, Harley got a job on the west coast. The y barely heard from him and Peter also lost contact after a while. After she hadn't heard anything from the young man in months, Pepper contacted an old friend living on the west coast. They told her, that Harley had lost his job. Creative differences or so people said. It took Pepper and Peter weeks to find Harley and when they did they were surprised about where he was. Apparently neither his mother nor his sister knew about the state he was in and so Pepper and Peter were the ones to pick him up from rehab. Harley wasn't the quirky energetic boy he had been. He was bitter and snarky and cold. He fell off the wagon twice. And then he disappeared.

For a few years after, everything else seemed fine. And then Peter called Pepper one day, late at night. His voice was shaking and she heard that he'd been crying. He was a grown man, even stronger than he had been as a teenage super hero, and she hadn't heard him cry for a decade. But he was so shake up that he could barely get the words out. “Car crash”, “Did everything they could”, “ it was too late.” The funeral was on a cold winter day and Pepper and Morgan were the first to arrive at the cemetery after Peter. The boy was standing in front of the graves of his parents, his head hung low. The boy who had already lost so many parental figures. His mom and dad, his uncle, Tony, and now... Pepper put an arm around his shoulders and he leaned into her. “I'm so sorry, Pep. I'm so sorry.” She swallowed down her tears and told hi it wasn't his fault. That he couldn't stop every bad thing around him from happening. And that she was glad that he had survived the crash, that he was fine. There had been three people in that car and only one died because Peter had managed to pull out his aunt quick enough. It was just the four of them, May, Peter, Pepper and Morgan. Pepper was holding May who had just become a widow again and Morgan was holding Peter's hand. Pepper looked over at the two of them and she knew that both of them were thinking of the days after Tony died, when Peter had been there for Morgan and May for Pepper. Now it was their turn. Happy had been so important to all of them but Pepper knew that if Tony had been there, he'd been broken. She remembered the way Tony had been the last time something had happened to Happy, how worried he'd been. And back then his best friend had made a full recovery. But now?

The next ten years went by without any big changes in their lives (except for Peter becoming the father of incredibly cute twins shortly after his thirtieth birthday) until Morgan told her mother that she was pregnant. Pepper loved her grandchild's father and knew that Tony would have loved him too. They were planning the weeding a few months after the due date and Pepper was just calling Morgan to confirm that she really wanted cheeseburgers at the reception. This was supposed to be a five minute call, if even that. She was supposed to laugh at Morgan for choosing fast food but then agree that it was a nice nod to her father's love for cheeseburgers. She wasn't supposed to hear that her grandchild wouldn't be born in three months. That he – she hadn't even known that it was a boy- wouldn't be born at all. Pepper stayed strong on the phone, for her daughter. She made sure that Morgan wasn't alone, that she was taken care off. But once the call was disconnected she sunk to the floor and started crying right there, in the middle of her kitchen. For a second she wished that Tony was there, to hold her, to talk to her, to drive to Morgan's place with her. But then she imagined what this would have done to him. When there were no tears left to cry, Pepper got up, made some soup and went to see her daughter. To be there for her. Through something that she couldn't even imagine having to go through.

The day Pepper Potts died was a sunny summer morning. The birds were chirping and everything seemed peaceful. And with one last tiny breath the thing Tony couldn't live without left this world. After living without him for almost four decades. This was something that not even Tony's suit or his Ais F.R.I.D.A.Y. And EDITH could shield her from. The armour he had put around his world failed to save the love of his life from death. But Morgan, the girl who had come from that love, the woman who would never forget her parents, was glad that her father didn't have to outlive her mother. She had seen her struggle with outliving him and knew that Tony wouldn't have wanted to see this day. So she sat at her mother's bed and held her hand and cried silently for herself. She was the one who lost her parents. They were back together.

Those and so many other days Pepper was almost glad that Tony wasn't there. But for every time she thought that way, there were a thousand moments when she wished he could be there to see it for himself.  
When Peter smiled after Morgan gave him her night light on which she had drawn the Spider-Man emblem. The day he got married to that amazing girl. When Sam finally came round and made peace with being Captain America. When Peter managed to clear his name and in the process Tony's too and went back to being Spider-Man, even with the entire world's eyes on him. Harley showing up years after they heard from him, telling them that he'd been clean for a decade, that his wife was expecting, and that he was there to apologize- which they didn't let him, instead he found himself in never ending hugs. The day May and Happy got married with Morgan as their ring bearer and Peter throwing rose petals from his place up on the ceiling. Even the small party they had on their tenth anniversary, only weeks before the crash. When Morgan's second child took her first steps and Pepper could see the darkness slowly fade from her own daughter's face. And the day before Pepper Potts died.

The doctor's had told them that it wouldn't be long, that they should say their goodbyes. There were almost no tears because they spent the entire day looking at pictures. Pictures of Tony and Pepper, Pepper and Morgan, Morgan and Tony, Tony and Peter, Peter and May, May and Happy, Happy and Rhodey, Rhodey and Sam, Sam and Bucky. And all the other important people in their lives. Clint and Bruce, Nat and Thor, Maria and Fury, Wanda and Vision, Nebula and Carol, T'Challa and Rocket, and so many more. They laughed and Pepper felt less tired than she had on any day the past year. The next morning she didn't wake up. Her last smile was still on her lips when she was buried next to her husband.

**Author's Note:**

> (basically) TW: Addiction, car crash, loss of a pregnancy, PTSD


End file.
